Slow Decay

body, flat on three sides. The white hairs seemed to be aiming themselves at her face, like an albino medusa, except that she felt like she was turning to jelly rather than rock.

The door jamb hit her as she staggered sideways, but the pain was minor compared with the noose of fire that was tightening around her neck. All she could see now was a grey tunnel with the office very small and very far away at the centre of it. Tiredness washed up her arms. She just wanted to give up and fall asleep.

Something was fumbling at her throat, and it took a few seconds before she realised that it was Jack. She tried to tell him that it was all too late, too far away and too much trouble, but he didn’t seem to understand. Something went bang, a long way in the distance, and then bang again, and she was being spun around. The pressure on her throat relaxed, and pain flooded up through the nerves, the veins and the arteries until her neck was incandescent with agony. She fell to her knees, retching, face burning and sweat coursing down her cheeks and forehead. Acid burned her mouth as she vomited thin strings of mucus onto the carpet. Firm hands were on her shoulders. She was being turned around again, slowly this time. Jack’s face swam into sight through her searing hot tears.

‘Last time I held a girl’s head while she threw up,’ he said comfortingly, ‘it was too many hyper-vodkas rather than an alien worm thing that did it. I think the after-effects actually lasted longer. Nice girl — I think she went on to become President of somewhere. Or something.’

‘What the hell was that?’ Gwen coughed.

‘See for yourself.’ Jack helped her up, one arm around her shoulders and the other supporting her beneath her arm. She leaned gratefully against him. The warmth and the musk of his body enveloped her, a smell compounded of spice, leather and sandalwood. Her face touched the side of his neck, and she had to smother the sudden desire to lick his skin, tasting him.

‘What’s a hyper-vodka?’ she asked, trying to distract herself. ‘Is it some kind of cocktail?’

‘Oh it’s some kind of cocktail all right.’ Jack’s hand released its grip on her arm, but he still held her around the shoulders. ‘Feeling OK?’

‘Nothing a neck transplant wouldn’t fix.’ Gwen’s eyes suddenly focused, and the world came into existence around her. They were back in the foyer of the Scotus Clinic. Directly ahead of her was the receptionist’s desk, and attached to it, thrashing back and forth, was the most bizarre creature Gwen had ever seen. For a moment she thought there were two or three of the creatures all entwined together, all struggling to escape, but she quickly realised that there was only one of them. It had three sections, black with irregular blue rings the colour of cigarette smoke. They were triangular in cross-section, and joined together in the centre like a Catherine Wheel. Each section terminated in a mass of writhing white fibres. Two of the sections were stuck somehow to the desk, and the creature was thrashing around with a sound like paper being crumpled.

‘I’m thinking of calling it Ringo,’ Jack said. ‘On account of the rings. I know it’s corny, but I kinda think it’s appropriate. It just doesn’t look like a Brian to me. Or a Kevin.’

‘What did you do to it?’

‘I stapled it to the desk.’ Jack reached down and picked a chunky electric stapler from the floor, something designed for fastening hundreds of sheets of paper together. A lead ran from the stapler to a socket in the wall. ‘Found this on a shelf. Thought it was a weapon of some kind. If I’d actually considered the matter carefully I would have wondered what a personal assistant was doing with a weapon but, hey, maybe Doctor Scotus kept trying to get her bent over the photocopier. Anyway, it worked well enough for me to staple the thing to the desk.’

‘That’s… not of this Earth, is it?’

He looked carefully at the stapler. ‘It says Rexel. Maybe that’s the planet where it was built.’

‘I meant the creature.’

‘Oh, that is definitely not only not of this Earth, it’s not of this solar system or even this arm of the galaxy.’

‘Then how did it get here?’

‘Slipped through the Rift, I expect. Although probably not in that form.’

‘What is it — some kind of guard dog?’

Jack shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. I reckon it was left behind by accident. It looks like Doctor Scotus and his team left in a hurry. When you’re feeling up to it, we’ll search the place.’

Gwen eyed the creature warily. ‘Leaving Ringo here?’

Jack shrugged. ‘It’s not going anywhere.’ He stepped forward, grabbed the one free segment of the creature and wrestled it down to the desk, then brought the power stapler round and held it just below the writhing mass of white fibres. Bang, and all three of the creature’s sections were fastened down, leaving only the central hub free to flex and thump against the desk. ‘Especially not now.’

Casting nervous glances over her shoulder at Ringo — the name had unfortunately stuck in her mind — Gwen followed Jack back into the office, flicking on the light switch as she did so. Part of her was waiting for something to leap at her throat with a sound like rustling paper, but nothing happened. Jack just kept walking, oblivious.

‘What happens if there’s another one?’ Gwen asked. ‘Maybe they come in twos. Or threes.’

‘And maybe they don’t. If there’s another one then the finest weapon that the people of the planet Rexel can manufacture will take care of it for us. But I think if there was another then it would have attacked by now.’

Together they searched through the office, Gwen starting to the left of the door, Jack to the right, meeting at the far side where Doctor Scotus’s desk took pride of place, both of them circling around the oddly shaped chairs that sat either side of it. Apart from framed certificates on the walls and a bookcase full of medical textbooks on nutrition, digestion and, strangely, parasitology, Gwen didn’t come up with anything. Judging by the speed at which he was moving, Jack wasn’t having much more luck. When they got to the desk, Gwen took a moment to admire its solidity, and the slab of marble that formed its surface. Four marks in a rectangle on the surface indicated that something had been removed recently — probably a laptop, judging by the shape.

The drawers were all empty of anything apart from basic supplies; staples, bits of paper, rubber bands. Gwen was probably being over-optimistic thinking that there might be something incriminating there, but life could sometimes be surprising like that.

Jack, meanwhile, was looking though the waste-paper basket that sat by the side of the desk. ‘Surprising how often people forget about the rubbish,’ he said, pulling a crumpled piece of paper from its depths. He unfolded it, and the sound made Gwen’s skin crawl. It sounded too much like the creature that was outside in the lobby, stapled to the desk. She raised a hand to her neck, which still ached.

Jack saw her shiver. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But I think this is important. It looks like a recent list of clients at the clinic. Lucy Sobel, Marianne Till…’ His gaze locked with hers. ‘Rhys Williams.’

She nodded. ‘And how many others.’

‘They had twenty-eight clients in all. Quite a profit, this Doctor Scotus was making.’

‘A profit on twenty-eight clients? How much were they paying?’ Gwen grabbed the sheet of paper from Jack’s hands and glanced down the list. ‘Rhys, you arsehole! That’s our holiday fund gone for a burton!’

‘Recriminations later. Investigation now.’

‘OK, sorry. But still…’

‘Gwen, he’s likely to be punished enough over the next week or so. Cut him some slack. He only did it because he wanted to look good for you. And, frankly, who wouldn’t?’

She sighed. ‘OK. Thanks.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything more we can find here. There were two other rooms leading off the lobby. Let’s give them a quick going over.’

They headed out of the office, bypassing Ringo, which was still thumping the centre of its body frantically against the surface of the receptionist’s desk. Jack chose the middle door, Gwen the one on the left.

Gwen’s choice was a well-appointed examination room. The walls and ceiling were a clinical white. A desk was pressed up against one wall, with one of the backless chairs in front of it. A curtained area off to one side could be used for undressing. A trolley with a black PVC surface pushed against another wall was presumably for examinations. Apart from some abstract paintings on the wall, there was nothing in the room.

Gwen went through the desk drawers one by one, just on the off-chance, but they had been hurriedly emptied of everything apart from the normal detritus of office life: a handful of paper clips, the caps from three ball point pens, a whole load of loose staples, some bits of grey lint, three sealed pads of Post-it notes…

And a small foil blister pack containing two pills that had been pushed to the back of the middle drawer.